You'd think, while the Royal Commission is still ongoing and some way away from its final report, those whose industries are in its sights would at the very least keep their heads down.

But that doesn't seem to be the inclination of Aussie Home Loans chief James Symond, who was quoted in our sister paper The Sydney Morning Herald yesterday lamenting how tighter lending standards risked locking people out of owning their own home.

"You might get, en masse, a whole bunch of people that just simply can no longer afford a home, full stop," he said. "The big banks are concerned. They're tightening their credit policy because of risk, and regulation, and the royal commission, and the tone of the marketplace today."

So, hold the avocado toast, this whole housing affordability conundrum is basically about insufficient lending! This from a man whose mortgage brokers get a percentage-based commission on the size of the total loan written by a bank, and get further incentives through trailing commissions to make loans as big as possible so borrowers take a long time to pay them off. No wonder he wants banks to let people borrow as much as possible. Given all this, it will come as no shock at all to readers to learn that lending to owner-occupiers, the people Symond claims he's concerned for, is actually rising.

And that wasn't the end of Symond's chutzpah. Aussies Home Loans has since 2017 been fully owned by the Commonwealth Bank, but a fortnight ago CBA announced it would offload the mortgage broker as part of its larger demerger plans initiated in response to the Royal Commission's concerns about vertical integration.

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That was all about "optics", said Symond, the nephew of the business' now very wealthy founder, who insisted customers get "as unbiased service as possible" from his brokers. A fully separate Aussie Home Loans, he said, would operate exactly as before, but cut off such perceptions "at the knees".

Thanks to the Royal Commission, we now know that in 2015, Aussies' mortgage brokers sent 39.7 per cent of all mortgages by volume to CBA or its fully owned subsidiaries. The bank's market share of home loans at that point, according to a reputational impact brief lodged in evidence, was just 25 per cent.